Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [237]
On numbed knees he crawls, his habit pulled up over his loins, his hand outstretched toward unattainable happiness. Suddenly he falls back, his eyes bulging, his features convulsed, like the unnatural shocks produced by Volta’s pile on the face of a corpse. A bluish foam purples his lips; from his mouth comes a strangled hissing, like a hydrophobe’s, for when it reaches its paroxysmal phase, as Charcot rightly puts it, this terrible disease, which is satyriasis, the punishment of lust, impresses the same stigmata as rabid madness.
It is the end. Rodin bursts into insane laughter, then crumples to the floor, lifeless, the living image of cadaveric rigor.
In a single moment he went mad and died in mortal sin.
I push the body toward the trapdoor, careful not to dirty my patent-leather boots on the greasy soutane of my last enemy.
There is no need for Luciano’s dagger, but the assassin can no longer control his actions, his bestial compulsion to murder over and over. Laughing, he stabs a lifeless, dead cadaver.
* * *
Now I move with you to the trap’s rim, I stroke your throat as you lean forward to enjoy the scene, I say to you, “Are you pleased with your Rocambole, my inaccessible love?”
And as you nod lasciviously and sneer, drooling into the void, I slowly tighten my fingers.
“What are you doing, my love?”
“Nothing, Sophia. I am killing you. I am now Guiseppe Balsamo and have no further need of you.”
The harlot of the Archons dies, drops to the water. With a thrust of his knife, Luciano seconds the verdict of my merciless hand, and I say to him: “Now you can climb up again, my trusty one, my black soul.” As he climbs, his back to me, I insert between his shoulder blades a thin stiletto with a triangular blade that leaves hardly a mark. Down he plunges; I close the trapdoor: it is done. I abandon the sordid room as eight bodies float toward the Chatelet by conduits known only to me.
I return to my small apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Honore”, I look at myself in the mirror. There, I say to myself, I am the King of the World. From my hollow spire I rule the universe. My power makes my head spin. I am a master of energy. I am drunk with command.
* * *
Alas, life’s vengeance is not slow in coming. Months later, in the deepest crypt of the castle of Tomar, I—now master of the secret of the subterranean currents and lord of the six sacred places of those who had been the Thirty-six Invisibles, last of the last Templars and Unknown Superior of all Unknown Superiors—should win the hand of Cecilia, the androgyne with eyes of ice, from whom nothing now can separate me. I have found her again, after the centuries that intervened since she was stolen from me by the man with the saxophone. Now she walks on the back of the bench as on a tightrope, blue-eyed and blond; nor do I know what she is wearing beneath the filmy tulle that bedecks her.
The chapel has been hollowed from the rock; the altar is surmounted by a canvas depicting the torments of the damned in the bowels of Hell. Some hooded monks stand tenebrously at my side, but I am not disturbed, I am fascinated by the Iberian imagination...
Then—O horror—the canvas is raised, and behind it, the admirable work of some Arcimboldo of caves, another chapel appears, exactly like this one. There before the altar Cecilia is kneeling, and beside her—icy sweat beads my brow, my hair stands on end—whom do I see, mockingly displaying his scar? The Other, the real Giuseppe Balsamo. Someone has freed him from the dungeon of San Leo!
And I? It is at this point that the oldest of the monks raises his hood, and I recognize the ghastly smile of Luciano, who—God knows how-escaped my stiletto, the sewers, the bloody mire that should have dragged his corpse to the silent depths of the ocean. He has gone over to my enemies in his rightful thirst for revenge.
The monks slough off their habits; they are head to toe in armor, a flaming cross on their